The Co-optation of Sensibility and the Subversion of Beauty

Abstract

Due to its ubiquity in experience, aesthetic sensibility has many manifestations, both overt and concealed. This paper examines some largely hidden ways in which taste and aesthetic judgment, which are manifested in sense experience, have been subtly appropriated and exploited. I identify and describe such procedures as the co-optation (or appropriation) of aesthetic sensibility, and they have damaging consequences for health, society, and the environment. These practices are a form of aesthetic negation that distorts and manipulates sensible experience in the interest of mass marketing and its profits. I call this pattern the co-optation of sensibility. Such practices have grave ethical significance and carry social and political implications. The aesthetic analysis of ordinary life has a significance that extends beyond the academy and suggests another role for aesthetics, a critical one: aesthetics as a tool of social analysis and political criticism.